Cooper By The Gross (All 144 Cooper Stories In One Volume)

by Bill Bernico

  “I can’t discuss it,” Gloria said. “It’s confidential.”

  I nodded. “I see,” I said. “And this is your way of getting back at me for not being able to tell you about my case. Is that it?”

  Gloria just stared at me. I stared back, not wanting to be the first to blink or speak. We each held our stare until Gloria couldn’t any longer and blinked. “All right,” she said. “So it’s not a big secret. It’s a simple tail job. I know it’s not as exciting as your top secret 007 assignment, but it pays the bills. I’m getting two hundred dollars for maybe an hour’s work.”

  “It’s not like I didn’t already know what you were hired to do,” I said. “Remember, I took the initial call and Mrs. Rutherford had already filled me in.”

  “Oh yeah,” Gloria said. “Say listen, I’ll probably be finished with my part of this dance before nine o’clock. Are you sure I can’t help you with your case?”

  I held up one palm and shook my head gently. Gloria got the message and didn’t press it.

  “Say, boss,” Gloria said. “Since I have to be working past our office hours tonight, how about if I get the rest of this afternoon off? I have a few things I could be doing.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Take off. I can hold the fort down by myself.”

  Just then the office door opened and Dad came in, looking fit as a fiddle and better than he had before his heart attack.

  “Hi kids,” Dad said. “Are you two busy?”

  I stood up and walked around my desk to greet him. “Dad,” I said. “How do you feel?”

  “With my hands,” Dad said and then remembered that Gloria was also in the room. He turned to her and said, “Oops, sorry, Gloria.”

  “Don’t be, Clay,” Gloria said. “I’ve heard ‘em all before. Remember? I used to work with my dad, too.”

  Dad walked over and gave Gloria a big hug and then stepped back to get a better look at her. “Is it my imagination, or do you get prettier every time I see you?”

  Gloria smiled a broad smile and then turned her head toward me, looking for some sort of response. I said nothing.

  “I see you didn’t pass your charming gene on to your son, Clay,” Gloria said.

  “Is he taking you for granted?” Dad said.

  Dad turned to me. “You should appreciate your partner, Elliott,” he said.

  “That’s the same thing I’ve been telling him,” Gloria said, “But I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet.”

  “So what brings you here today?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Dad said. “I work here, don’t I? And this is a regular workday, so here I am. Put me to work.”

  I shrugged. “I’m on something,” I said, “but it’s super confidential. I can’t let anyone, even you, Dad, in on it. Sorry.”

  Gloria hiked a thumb at me. “Mr. Bond over there is on some sort of secret mission,” she said. “He won’t even tell me about it. And the job I’m on will only take an hour tops to finish. Sorry, but there’s nothing for you to do in my case, either.”

  Dad looked around the office and sighed. “Kinda slow, in other words,” he said.

  “Not in other words,” I said. “Those are the perfect words.”

  “Does that mean you both have a little time to kill before you start on your cases?” Dad said.

  Gloria and I both nodded. “I guess so,” I said. “I’m first starting on my case tomorrow morning.”

  “And I don’t have to start mine until seven-thirty tonight,” Gloria said. “Was there something you wanted to do, Clay?”

  “I was just wondering,” Dad said. “How’d you both like to come with me and help me pick out a new car?”

  Gloria looked at me, her eyebrows raised. I turned to Dad. “You’re giving up your Olds?” I said. “What prompted this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve had it for twenty-three years and put on more than two hundred fifty thousand miles. I was thinking I’d better get rid of it before it starts giving me trouble.”

  “Are you getting another Oldsmobile, Dad?” I said.

  Dad shrugged. “I was thinking I’d try something different for a change,” he said.

  My eyebrows rose. “A Cooper without an Olds,” I said. “This will be a first. Grandpa had an Olds since the thirties and that’s all you’ve driven since the sixties. What kind of car could lure you away from General Motors?”

  “I was watching a rerun of Mission Impossible this morning on the oldies station,” Dad said. “And there was a commercial for a Toyota Camry that caught my eye.”

  I smiled. “You’ve finally realized that the Japanese are making better cars than we do over here?”

  “I have to admit it,” Dad said. “When my Olds was in the shop they gave me a Camry to drive for a few days and I was impressed. I guess the commercial just reminded me how much I liked driving that Toyota. So, you kids want to come with me to the dealership and help me pick one out? I’ll spring for ice cream afterwards.”

  The mental picture I got of the three of us licking ice cream cones made me smile. It got to Gloria, too and she laughed.

  “Sure,” Gloria said. “What the heck.”

  “Just don’t insist on fixing my cone this time,” I said.

  “Fixing your cone?” Dad said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you remember?” I said. “When I was a kid and you’d stop for ice cream. We’d drive away licking our cones, but apparently I didn’t lick mine fast enough and it started to drip done the sides of the cone. I guess you didn’t want me dripping ice cream on your seats so you’d take my cone and lick the drips off all around the edge of my cone and then hand it back to me.”

  “I did that?” Dad said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And from then on it taught me to lick my cone faster if I didn’t want you slobbering all over it.”

  Gloria laughed at that one. “You, too?” she said. “I thought my dad had a monopoly on fixing cones. Must be a dad thing.”

  “Hey,” Dad said. “I was paying for those cones. I should be able to fix one every now and then.”

  “Fine,” I said. “If mine starts dripping today, you can fix it, okay?”

  I locked up the office and we all rode in Dad’s 1989 Oldsmobile to the Toyota dealer in Burbank. Dad pulled into the lot and parked near a row of new Camrys. The three of us got out and started walking down the row of cars. Like a spider rushing to a trapped fly in his web, it didn’t take a young salesman long to make his way over to us and start in with the glad handing and rhetoric.

  He held his hand out to me and said, “Good afternoon sir. My name is Brad Foster, and no, I’m not related to Jody. And you are?”

  “Also not related to Jody,” I said. I didn’t shake his hand, but said, “And I am just looking. Dad here is actually the one thinking of buying.”

  Brad quickly turned his attentions to Dad. “Good afternoon sir. What can I show you today?”

  “The back of your head as you’re walking away?” Dad said sarcastically.

  Brad laughed, not realizing that Dad was serious.

  “No, seriously,” Brad said, looking at Dad’s Olds. “Will you be trading in this fine specimen of a car? It’s an Oldsmobile, isn’t it? A ninety-seven, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Eighty-nine,” Dad said. “And yes, I was considering trading it if I can get the right price for it.”

  Brad stuck his head inside Dad’s driver side window and glanced at the odometer. He pulled his head out and looked at Dad. “Looks like you’ve babied this car, sir. It’s barely broken in,” he said. “Fifty three thousand miles is pretty low for that year.”

  Dad shook his head. “Not fifty-three,” he said. “It’s over.”

  Brad looked astonished. “A hundred fifty-three thousand?” he said.

  Dad shook his head. “Two hundred fifty-three thousand carefree miles,” he told Brad. “And you’re right, Brad. It’s just getting broken in. So what’s it worth on a trade?”

 
; Brad looked at Dad and said, “If you’ll let me have your keys, I can have my buyer appraise it while you test drive one of these new models.” Brad stood there with his hand out.

  “Just give me a ball park figure,” Dad said. “I won’t hold you to it, but I’m not going to test drive anything until I have an idea of what I can get for my Olds.”

  “Now this is just a ball park figure,” Brad said. “And I could be off either way, but I’d say you’re looking at about eighteen thousand dollars.”

  Dad smiled and looked at me and then at Brad. “Never mind the appraisal,” Dad said. “I’ll take it.” He turned to me and said, “You hear that, Elliott? Brad’s going to give me eighteen thousand dollars for my Olds in trade.”

  Brad’s mouth dropped open and his eyes got wide. “Uh, no, sir,” Brad said. “That was the cash difference I was talking about. Trade-in value on your car is around three hundred dollars.”

  I looked back at the dealership and saw several other salesmen standing around in front of the large glass window, looking our way. Dad saw them, too, and took the opportunity to put one hand around Brad’s shoulder, turn him toward the crowd of gawkers and start walking him back toward the office. He let Brad get two steps ahead of him before he raised one leg and gave Brad a swift kick in the ass.

  “There,” Dad said to Brad. “Go back and tell your co-workers that Clay Cooper is nobody’s fool.” He turned to Gloria and me. By now we were laughing hysterically. Dad said, “Let’s go, kids. I don’t think Brad here wants to deal.” We all got back into Dad’s Olds and drove away. Out my window I could see Brad rubbing his ass on his way back to the showroom.

  Gloria leaned over the back seat and pointed to the south. “There’s another Toyota dealer just two miles to the south on Western Avenue,” she said. “Want to check there?”

  “All right,” Dad said.

  I looked over the flawless interior of Dad’s car and listened to the smooth purring its engine made as we drove along. The exterior was certainly in good condition. Except for the two hundred fifty thousand miles, I really didn’t see why Dad wanted to trade it in.

  “You sure you want to do this?” I said. “If you keep on doing what you’ve been doing, you could probably get another two hundred thousand miles out of this car.”

  “You think so?” Dad said.

  “Besides,” Gloria pointed out, “if you really have your mind set on a new car, you’d do much better to keep this one and go for an outright purchase. These dealers always have a pretty good spread between retail and their cost and if you find an unsold model from last year, you can save even more. And with the markup they have on these new cars, they’d be getting your Olds for nothing anyway, so why not just keep it?”

  “I think you may have something there, Gloria,” Dad said. “But just let me have a quick look at the Toyota so I can at least satisfy my curiosity.”

  We drove down Western, past Sunset, past Santa Monica and there on the right was a large auto dealership whose sign let the whole town know that they sold not only Toyota, but several other foreign makes as well. Dad pulled into the lot and stopped near the row of Camrys.

  We all got out and walked along with Dad as he scanned the window stickers on each car. Seven or eight cars down the row I saw a man also looking at the cars, but he was coming this way from the other end of the row. He looked familiar and at first I couldn’t place him. Suddenly it came to me. This was Rudy Carver heading our way. Rudy still had his gaze trained on the cars and didn’t get a look at me and I wanted to keep it that way, so I turned away, pretending to be interested in the window sticker of a red Camry. I waited until he’d passed by me before rejoining Dad and Gloria.

  “What was that all about?” Dad said.

  “What was what all about?” I said.

  “All that business about burying your face in the window sticker until Rudy Carver passed us,” Dad said.

  “Now how would you know Rudy Carver?” I said.

  “Who doesn’t know him?” Dad said. “We’ve crossed paths several times in the past. He’s one bad dude.”

  “Dude?” I said. “Who says dude anymore? Didn’t that go out with platform shoes and Afros?”

  “He’s a very undesirable and despicable person,” Dad said. “You like that better?”

  “Stick with dude,” I said. “So what do you know about him?”

  The three of us stopped and I motioned them to step between two of the cars, out of Carver’s sight. Dad looked over the roof of the Toyota and could see that Rudy was too far away to hear anything before he spoke. “Several years ago I was working on a case involving a missing child,” Dad said. “Her parents called me in when they got a ransom note telling them not to call the police. They wanted me to handle the payoff and get the girl back for them. Well, I took the case, brought the money to the drop location but never got the girl back, at least not alive.”

  Gloria gasped. “My god, what happened?” she said.

  “Another man created a diversion while Carver picked up the money,” Dad said. “I got a call the next day at my office telling me where I could find the girl. Needless to say, she was dead. She had been dead for two days, according to the medical examiner.”

  “And you’re sure it was Carver?” I said.

  “It was,” Dad said, “but I could never get the proof that I needed to have the police bring him in.”

  “That’s terrible,” Gloria said. “What did you do?”

  “What could I do?” Dad said. “They covered their tracks very well and left no evidence. They got away with murder.”

  “Did Dean know about this?” I said.

  “Eventually,” Dad said. “I mean, I told him about it the same day the girl’s parents hired me but said that they threatened to kill the girl if the cops got involved. There wasn’t much he could do, but that case has haunted him for all these years. Just the thought of Rudy Carver makes him grit his teeth.”

  “I know,” I said, and then realized that I’d said too much about it. “That is, I know how frustrating something like that can be. I’m just glad Rudy Carver is not my loose end.”

  Gloria shot me a look, but I refused to make eye contact with her. Dad finished looking over the Camrys in that row and we all turned around and headed back to his Olds.

  “You know,” Dad said. “I guess I will just hang on to my Olds and drive it until it falls off its wheels. Let’s go.”

  It was almost five o’clock when the three of us got back to the office. Dad made a beeline for the bathroom and Gloria took that opportunity to sidle up next to me and whisper, “What’s up with you and Rudy Carver?” she said. “And what was that you said about Dean and knowing what he feels when he thinks of Carver?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just forget it.”

  “That’s your case, isn’t it?” Gloria said. “You’re working on something for Dean that involves Rudy Carver, aren’t you?”

  “Shhh,” I said. “Dad wasn’t supposed to know anything about this, and neither were you. You have to promise me not to say a word about this to anyone. Lives could be at stake here, so your silence is very important.”

  Gloria stopped whispering just before the bathroom door opened and Dad stepped out.

  “You know,” Dad said, still wiping his hands on a paper towel, “You two really ought to learn how to whisper at a lower volume.” He turned to me and said, “Rudy Carver, eh? What’s Dean got you doing for him and how is Carver involved?”

  “Oh that just great,” I said. “Dean swore me to secrecy and now three people know about it. This is like a bad episode of The Andy Griffith Show.”

  “I saw that one,” Dad said. “Isn’t that where Barney leaks it to the whole town about the gold truck coming through Mayberry? I love that episode.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and sighed heavily. “Oh Christ,” I said.

  “Well,” Gloria said. “Let’s see if we can’t put a positive spin on this thing.”

&n
bsp; “How can you possibly see an up side to this mess?” I said.

  “For one thing,” Dad said, “Whatever it is you have to do for Dean just got easier by three hundred percent. Gloria and I will be glad to help you out on this one, won’t we, Gloria?”

  Gloria smiled and nodded. “Beats checking up on Lumpy Rutherford,” she said.

  “Who?” Dad said.

  “Lloyd Rutherford,” Gloria explained. “That who I’m tailing for his wife. She wants to see if he’s cheating on her. But now that I can finish that case in an hour or less, I’ll be free to help your son with his case.”

  “And what a case for me to get back in the game with,” Dad said. “Where do we start, Elliott? Come on, you might as well fill us in on the details. It’s the three of us now and even if Gloria hadn’t guessed what you were up to, it would still have been the two of us.”

  “How do you figure that?” I said.

  “How long have I known Dean Hollister?” Dad said.

  “Since you were kids,” I said. “Grandpa and Dean’s dad were close friends. Hell, I’ve known the Hollisters all my life.”

  “So have I,” Dad said. “And before he came to you with this problem, who do you suppose he unloaded on first?”

  “You?” I said.

  “Bingo,” Dad said. “Now let’s stop arguing and get to work putting Rudy Carver away, shall we?”

  “Oh boy,” Gloria said. “At last, a case with some meat on the bone. When are we starting on it?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’ve got a few ideas I want to try out and I have to admit that I had discounted some of my ideas because they took more than one person to execute. But now I’m wide open again.”

  I looked at the clock. It was coming up on five-thirty. I looked at Gloria. She was tapping the imaginary watch on her wrist to let me know she had to go.

  “I’d better get moving,” Gloria said. “I’ve got a few things to do before I head over to the Stellar Lanes on Pico. I guess I’ll see you both tomorrow morning. Good night, gentlemen.” Gloria left the office and headed down to the elevator.